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The international social media company discussed in this post is one of our clients.

Social media is becoming more and more popular. But, with popularity comes competition, so the leaders in the field cannot sit back and enjoy their success. Instead, they need to continue finding ways to improve their business.

Despite the popularity of social media, social networking companies are often finding it difficult to generate revenue, especially since the majority of the companies are providing a free service. This means that social media companies need to sell online advertising space.

However, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB), especially those with limited marketing resources, are often not leveraging online advertising. Similarly, social media companies often don’t pursue SMB advertisers, knowing that these organizations will require additional support and education both to learn to create marketing campaigns as well as to use the tools to manage these ads and optimize results.

Despite these challenges, an internationally renowned social media company wanted to tap into this underserved advertising market and target SMBs. However, the highly popular social media company lacked sales support resources that would allow it to effectively reach out to SMBs and secure their advertisements.

Aware of our capabilities to rev up the entire sales process, the brand’s business leaders reached out to us and tasked us with a multipronged revenue generation approach. We were tasked with implementing an inside sales team to educate new SMB prospects, creating an outbound lead generation program, contacting prospects, and providing new advertisers with marketing support.

Our Customer Acquisition solution, which incorporates marketing strategy, sales execution, and customer data analytics into an integrated system, was instrumental in the process, allowing the social media company to improve lead generation, nurturing, and qualification as well as customer acquisition.

The first step was for us to fully understand the social media company’s cost-per-click and cost-per-impression offerings. This insight allowed us to establish sales goals and recommend a comprehensive sales solution that would be used to target SMBs. Secondly, having a good grasp of this information would be instrumental when training SMBs to execute a successful online advertising process.

In March 2011, we kicked off a 90-day pilot program with eight of our sales representatives. The pilot allowed us and the company’s leaders to develop dedicated training and coaching sessions specifically designed to reduce sales representatives’ learning time while at the same time improving their performance. A 30-day educational program taught prospects how to use the social media company’s platform to advertise their products and identify potential buyers. This reduced SMB customer churn by 15 percent.

Once the prospects enrolled in the program, our sales representatives went into full gear to build advertising campaigns and provide marketing consulting services while launching online advertisements, training customers, and optimizing campaigns. Not only did this integrated technology system provide a single database and platform, but it also made it easy to delve deeper into performance analytics, prioritize leads based on established characteristics, and determine the length of the sales cycle as well as the success of each sales effort.

Customer data was provided to each prospective advertiser, allowing the SMBs to see the specific number of potential buyers available among the 400,000 people actively using the social network. This data also allows SMBs to better target their audience, through Geotargeting, demographics, and personal interests.

Our efforts helped to more than double the number of prospects contacted. Further, we converted more than 36 percent of qualified leads into sales—above the 30 percent target set by the social media company.

These results led to us becoming the flagship sales center for the social media company. And, we continue to deliver, allowing this client to be more scalable globally. Instead of succumbing to the challenges, this social media company was able to find the best partner to achieve the growth it needed to remain successful.